Jonathan Birge

Housing numbers were just released, and the big news is that home sales were up 11% from the last month. That’s 11% up in volume, not price. Prices are still abysmal on a relative basis, down 12% from this time last year (and yet still too high, if you ask me). There are more foreclosures in process in California than home sales in the entire nation. However, everybody says this spike in volume is great news, and a sign the housing market is turning around.

But isn’t it true that if the stock market goes down on higher than expected volume, these same experts will call that a sign of great weakness for the equities market and a harbinger of doom?

Can somebody tell me how it is that rising volume with falling prices is terrible when it happens in the stock market but it’s an unmitigated positive when it happens in the housing market? My current guess is that they are wrong in both cases, and that you can’t glean much predictive value from volume in any market.

When the new unibody MacBook Pros (MBPs, henceforth) came out, many owners were up in arms over the fact that the new, supposedly high-end models lost SATA 2, and were only capable of 1.5 Gb/s SATA 1 speeds. Some people felt this was fair because Apple only provides SATA 1 drives, but this isn’t entirely true: some of the upgrade drives Apple offers on its online store are drives that would support 3.0 Gb/s speeds if Apple had enabled them.

A few weeks ago, Apple quietly released a firmware upgrade that enabled SATA 2 on the new MBPs. Unfortunately, something is wrong with the hardware, because now people with SATA 2 drives are having problems right and left. Apparently, the SATA bus on the MBP is unable to handle 3.0 Gb/s, and large numbers of transfer errors are occurring. SATA is designed to catch these errors, but since they’re not supposed to happen in the first place the result is not pretty. The system hangs for several seconds as the operating system deals with the errors and the data is reread. This causes the infamous Apple “spinning beach ball,” especially if a lot of processes are competing for disk access.

If I were to speculate (and what fun is a blog if you can’t do that?) I’d say that Apple’s hardware engineers used a cable that isn’t capable of reliably supporting the higher bit rate. Having opened up my MBP to upgrade the hard drive, I’m not surprised that the cable they used would have problems. It’s an unshielded ribbon cable that runs right along the case of the hard drive. It probably has all sorts of parasitic capacitances. I’m guessing their engineers tested it at 1.5 Mb/s and saw no problems, and then somebody rushed the firmware out without adequately testing it.

To make matters worse, this bit of poor hardware engineering triggers an even more egregious bit of software engineering: the ’spindump’ process. This little piece of Mac OS X kicks on automatically whenever a process hangs, and writes a ridiculous amount of information to the disk so that Apple can diagnose the problem. Of course, if you’re already having a hang because of hard drive problems, the last thing you need is for the system to respond by spewing massive amounts of data at the disk. It’s often enough to take a minor problem and make it a major one that requires a hard shutdown of the computer. Brilliant, Apple. This is my first Apple computer since abandoning Apple in 1997 during the dark years of System 8. So far I’m regretting the decision to come back…

How to tell if you’ve got a problem: If you have a stock MBP configuration, you probably don’t have a problem. However, if you have an upgraded drive (especially one of the 7200 RPM, or solid state drives) and you’ve been having system hangs, this may be the problem. If you’re nerdy enough, you can install smartmon tools and check to see if UDMA_CRC_Error_Count is more than zero.

How to fix: Until Apple gets it’s act together and issues a firmware update (if that’s even possible) to bring it’s “pro” level computers technologically inline with last years low-end models, you’re just going to have to disable SATA 2 on your drive. Whether or not this is possible, and how to do it, will vary by manufacturer. On Seagate Momentus drives, you can short two jumper pins to force the drive to use SATA 1 speeds. Details can be found in the user guide of your specific drive.

In the (usually) excellent Blogging at FL250, Sam attempts to defend the union system, arguing that the insanity that results from a system based entirely on seniority would be best fixed by just making the seniority list include the whole country. That strikes me as addressing a bad idea by simply trying the same bad idea on a grander scale. (Maybe he got that idea from the Federal Government.)

The salary for a junior regional first officer is around $30-$40 a year, working the worst hours the FAA will allow and doing the hardest flying he or she will ever see in their career. The salary for a senior captain pushing buttons on a fully automated 747 is over $200k a year.

Apparently the unions have decided that flying should be done at a level of ability that is proportional to the number of seats. I’m sure that’s a comforting thought if you’re in seat 1A of a 747, but perhaps not so much if you’re in seat 1A of a Saab 340. In truth, the smaller airplanes are the hardest to fly, and spend more of their time in the weather.

What’s funny is that this huge skew is exactly what a free labor market would probably arrive at, too, given its mercenary monetization of human life. The only difference between the unions and the free market is that the unions also make sure the pilot’s competence never comes into play at any level.

No matter the skepticism with which I regard free market capitalism, the results of alternative systems rarely fail to disappoint more.

(No parenting posts yet. I’m still getting my head around the idea that some poor kid has me as a father. So, I bring you another rant…)

One phenomenon (of many) about modern culture that really confuses me is the success of budget airlines. Of all the things on which one might want to skimp, I’d assume air travel is not one of them. Hasn’t the thought ever occurred to somebody, as they sit in a lightweight aluminum tube traveling 80% of the speed of sound through the upper atmosphere, “Maybe this should be costing me more than $39 if I know what’s good for me?” Do you really want the people responsible for launching your kids into the stratosphere to be running cash flow negative?

Why isn’t there one airline in the country that charges 50% more to get you there, but which actually does their damn job correctly? They could have decent customer service, and could afford to price their product based on what it takes to fly safely, not decide on price first and then see what they can do with that money.

As a case in point, there have been several regional airline crashes in the past several years that can be traced (at least partly) to poor pilot training and long work schedules. I’d be fine paying extra to fly on a commuter but get a pilot who was as well trained, rested, and paid as one who would normally fly a 747. After all, flying isn’t easier just because there are fewer seats. I can’t imagine I’m alone in this. I also can’t imagine I’m alone in thinking I’d rather get there late than have to have the living shit scared out of me (or worse) by flying through a storm. However, airlines will generally fly right through anything less than a thunderstorm because it saves them the fuel costs of having to divert around (assuming they even have the spare fuel given that they all generally fly with close to the minimum required by FAA regulations). And, of course, sometimes they end up flying through more than they bargained.

So, if an airline started up and came out with ads saying “At Birge Airlines, we put safety above all else, and it shows in our prices. We’ll fly around storms even if it doubles our flight time, we carry more fuel than legally required, and if the weather isn’t good anywhere along your route, there’s a good chance you’ll be staying at a hotel on our dime. We’ll get your there late and lighter in the wallet, but we guarantee we’ll get you there safely.”

Wouldn’t you book your next flight with them?

In the latest consumer price index (CPI) report, all seems fine. Core CPI went up 0.1%, suggesting the Fed is succeeding at holding back the evil specter of deflation, which brought down the economy during the Great Depression. But a closer look at the numbers reveals that were it not for the government imposing a huge tax increase on cigarettes, we would’ve had price deflation:

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) – Falling energy prices offset another big jump in cigarette prices in April, leaving the U.S. consumer price index flat for the month, the Labor Department reported Friday.

With energy prices down 20% since April 2008, the CPI has fallen 0.7% in the past 12 months, the largest decline since 1955. The decline in the consumer price index has sparked concerns at the Federal Reserve and among economists about deflation taking hold in the United States.

However, core inflation – which excludes volatile food and energy prices – has not declined and in fact has accelerated in the past four months, rising 0.3% in April, the biggest increase since July.

The core CPI was boosted in April by a 9.3% increase in tobacco prices as a new federal excise tax to pay for children’s health care kicked in.

Excluding tobacco, the CPI fell 0.1% in April and the core CPI rose 0.1%.

“Inflation is behaving very nicely,” said Bill Hampel, chief economist for the Credit Union National Association. The report was “further evidence that deflation is not going to happen.”

Maybe I’m too cynical, but when the difference between inflation and deflation is a government tax, you have to wonder about the timing of that tax and if there weren’t ancillary motivations behind it.

In previous posts, I’ve talked about the pretention of a lot of modern art, and how most of the effort seems to go into technobabble rationalization of the art, and not the art itself. Well, somebody giving a lecture at the MIT School of Architecture has recently scaled new heights on the tower of babble:

Architecture reimagines how humans inhabit the earth — how they organize themselves spatially and shape their everyday lives. If architecture is viewed as the material alteration of the earth’s surface, it has astronomical consequences: it can alter the very shape of a planet. Come see one way designs develop, through a demonstration of laser cutting in our fablab.

That last sentence is a bit of a let down, isn’t it? I had no idea the rest of MIT was underachieving so much with their lasers! We really need to step things up. I know there’s folks at MIT using lasers to do mundane things like creating attosecond bursts of X-rays, quantum entangled photons for cryptography, and 3D high resolution medical imaging, but I don’t think any of us are really coming close to the astronomical-planet-surface-altering bar set by the folks in the architecture department. Maybe we should start using them to cut out parts for things like this:

Some of the planet-altering work of the MIT architecture department.

(For the record, this came from the front page of the MIT architecture department’s online portfolio, a collection of the recent work of which they are apparently most proud.)

Is it me, or has the level of Bullshit in the humanities risen to a point that transcends the usual academic norm? I used to believe that every era has its valid place, and progress was always made, but I’m now starting to think that the intellectual charlatans sitting on faculties of art departments around the world may just be the present day equivalent of the Sophists. The more I listen to humanities academics, I’m increasingly convinced that future civilizations will look back on our times as a dark ages for the arts.

Maybe I’m just a curmudgeon, but I hate hate hate April Fool’s Day. You have to put up with no end to stupid press releases from humorless company drones who think it’s the height of cleverness and wit to announce a fake product (oh, you got us again Google!), lame jokes from coworkers, fake news stories, etc. And here’s the worst part of all, the only true joke of April 1st: you know it’s all coming. Doesn’t anybody else see the inherent abject absurdity of a day of scheduled practical jokes? It’s like a suspense story told backwards. Except it lasts all day.

Let’s end this shit, ok? Let’s make next year’s April Fool’s joke be that nobody does anything that day, but secretly plans to really screw somebody in May.